Month: April 2013

I just wanted to share a letter that I received from Greenpeace today. It was absolutely fantastic news:

We did it – the majority of Europe voted to ban bee pesticides!

It’s the world’s first continent-wide ban on these chemicals and it’s a moment our movement can be proud of.

Someone who has nothing to be proud of is the UK environment minister Owen Paterson, who not only voted against the ban, but lobbied on behalf of chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer to try and stop it going through. Paterson in a private letter even promised Syngenta that his “efforts would intensify” in the run-up to the vote [1].

Well, Mr Paterson, you lost. The bees won.

We know the current UK government has a disastrous track record on protecting our world – from climate change to bees. That’s why so much of our work on this campaign has focused on mainland Europe, where we managed to shift big countries like Germany who yesterday gave the ban their critical backing. That’s what a global network allows us to do.

Although we’ve been working in Europe against these bee-killing chemicals for years, here are a few of the things we’ve done in the past two weeks:

Campaigning on the ground in 12 key countries

Massive banner dropped on Syngenta’s HQ in Basel, Switzerland on 17th April

Turning the Austrian ministry of agriculture into a giant honeycomb on 18th April

Protest with hives outside Syngenta’s annual general meeting in Switzerland on 23rd April

Giant banner on roof of Bayer’s annual general meeting in Cologne, Germany on 26th April

‘Funeral for the queen bee’ at a Bayer factory in the Netherlands on 26th April

Joint ‘March of the Beekeepers’ with other campaigning organisations in Parliament square in the UK on 26th April

Although we failed to shift our UK representative Owen Paterson to support the ban, our movement still managed to shift the critical players across Europe and get the ban we all want.

And therein lies our strength. Like the bees who roam from field to field oblivious of the fences that divide their flowers, we’ll go wherever we need to in order to protect our environment and the world we live in.

Yesterday we showed the real strength of our global movement and achieved a remarkable success.

I have just sent this to Waitrose and Sainsbury’s as a follow up to my earlier complaints this week about their introduction of GMO meat into their supermarkets:

Evidence of Substantial Harm

Biotech advocates will try to water down the situation, like they’ve done in the past. They might pull out their often used claim that since there hasn’t been any harm seen after feeding GMOs to hundreds of millions of people for more than an decade, we can just ignore these and other findings. But in reality, no one in the world is monitoring the health impacts of these high-risk foods on human health. And numerous disorders, including GI problems, infertility, asthma, allergies, autism, diabetes, and many others, have been accelerating since GMOs were introduced in 1996.

And it may be no coincidence that the popular GMOs that contain Gene VI show significant, even lethal results in animal studies. Roundup Ready corn, for example, caused tumors, organ damage, and early death in rats. Rodents fed Roundup Ready soybeans have been afflicted with sterility, organ damage, accelerated aging, and high infant mortality. And Monsanto’s pesticide producing Bt corn has is linked with massive immune responses in mice—among others.

There are many guest speakers from the States all passionately mounting a resistance to Monsanto the GMO food giant. In the States GMO foods have been used extensively and since this time there has been a huge rise in food intolerances and many other disease states. Many doctors are urging patients with allergy issues to avoid the GM foods.

In the summit they mentioned how successful the European campaign has been by consumers which has kept this stuff so far at bay. But the supermarkets are caving in and bringing it through the back door.

So do everything you can at this critical time to get the supermarkets to back down. Get some more information, write to the supermarkets to complain about this dangerous company and their foods, keep up the pressure, tell everyone that you know about it and refuse to buy it. If they can’t sell it, they won’t buy any more.

The following offers a petition by Avaaz which is fighting Monsanto in another area; that of vegetables and fruit. Please, please sign to help to stop them. Nearly 2 million people have signed this petition in under 36 hours:

Our vegetables and fruit are about to be patented to grow Monsanto’s profits, making food more expensive and strangling the farmers we rely on everyday. But we can pressure European countries to step in and stop the corporate food attack. We have no time to lose — up to 800 patents are in the pipeline waiting to be approved!

Most people when they think of the cave man conjure images of a skin clad body building type bearing a club and maybe dragging his missus behind him by the hair. Well I can’t speak about much of this, but I would like to take a look at the presumptions made about the diet.

You can save yourself the bother of reading what I have to say and just watch the following great piece called Debunking the paleo diet by Christina Warriner

She basically concludes by suggesting that we can take three things from this study:

That no paleo diet would have been the same. Eskimos would certainly have eaten meat especially when there was little plant life to be had through the harsh winters. Yet closer to the equator there were plant and even grain based diets in place. It was all about variety and circumstance. Christina comments that there has been a huge decrease in the variety of species eaten in the modern American diet, Almost all foods eaten come from three main species; corn, soy or wheat.

That the foods that they were eating were fresh and seasonal. Over thousands of years we have developed many methods of preserving our foods in order to maintain foods year round. We use salt, sugar, smoking, drying and pickling techniques to keep our foods and to this we have recently added artificial preservatives. Christina is concerned of the effect on our gut flora by these techniques that essentially work by inhibiting bacterial growth.

They were eating wholefoods. The husks, fibres and tough stems were all very much part of the digestive process and important signals to the brain of feeling full, of satiety. Christina explains that in order to achieve the same sugar content as that provided by a 34 oz (1 litre) can of fizzy drink; we would need to eat 8.5 feet (2 1/2 metres) of sugar cane and that there was no physical way that we could achieve this. Modern methods of refinement have created foods that are calorie dense and concentrated. In small packages we can consume many more calories than would be the case with eating wholefoods. We are therefore short circuiting the brain function and losing that sense of fullness. We are losing the balance.

So variety, freshness and wholefoods. On that note. I’m going clubbing….

Another serious rant now. I wrote to Waitrose and to Sainsbury yesterday as Phillip Day had given us a tip off that we could no longer trust their meat sources to be non GM, or animals that had not been fed non GM foods. It seems that this garbage is now at our door.

Neither of these supermarkets could deny that this is going to be the case from now on.

The only way to ensure that your meat is not full of this utterly devastating stuff is to shop with Abel and Cole or go to a local organic butcher that you can talk to to confirm the origins of your animal.

You can currently also choose organic in these supermarkets but this isn’t the point. We need to shop now with our hearts and heads and pay the full price for non shoddy meat. Because these GM foods lead a death trail as farmers are committing suicide over the forced practices that Monsanto – the GM giant is imposing.

Avaaz reports:

Monsanto is driving an industrial farming takeover — trampling small farmers and small businesses as vast ‘monoculture’ farms of single crops leech the land of nutrients, diminish genetic diversity, and create dependency on fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals. The irony is, it’s not clear that the decimation of natural, sustainable farming has brought any boom in crop yields. Just more profit for the corporations. Our governments should step in, but Monsanto’s lobbying obstructs them.

Monsanto’s near monopoly is breath-taking, with patent rights over 96% of the GM seeds planted in the US. And despite concerns about health and safety, the same patents allow Monsanto to prevent any farmer or scientist from testing their seeds! Still, a few countries have banned or restricted Monsanto products.

They claim their products cost less, but often farmers are lured into multi-year contracts, then seed prices rise, and they have buy new seed each season and use more herbicides to keep out ‘superweeds’. In India, the situation is so dire that one cotton area has been called ‘the suicide belt’, as tens of thousands of the poorest farmers have taken their lives to escape crippling debt.

But farmers and scientists are also fighting back — and winning. One group in India has helped win three patent battles against the corporations, and in Brazil five million farmers sued Monsanto for unfair collection of royalties, and won a $2 billion payout! Scientists are campaigning for sustainable agriculture models, and just last week 1.5 million of us joined the fight against conventional patents in the EU.

Only a massive, global, united force can stand up to Monsanto and the corporate capture of our governments. Let’s expose this dominance of our democracies, help farmers speak out, challenge unjust laws and patents, and go head to head with the corporate lobbies. Pledge to support action now:

I was with Phillip Day for over 6 hours and boy that man can talk. I was captivated, interested and moved by what he had to say. One of the greatest impressions that he made on me over the course of the day was the need for Vitamin D.

I patiently explained to him that I know the need for vitamin D and that I diligently go outside, no matter what the weather for a good half an hour each and every day. That’s what we’ve been told to do after all isn’t it?

Phillip explained that in the UK there simply isn’t enough sunlight for us to produce vitamin D during the winter months. From equinox to equinox we will, he says go short. Then we wonder why when spring comes around we get sick.

Now most of us will think of rickets and bone issues with a lack of Vitamin D. In fact Vitamin D has nudged it’s way up the charts of super vitamins to be hailed as one of the most important nutrients to human health. It up regulates around 10% of the human genome. Which in basic terms makes us more resistant to fungi, bacteria and viruses. Worried about flu? Get your shot of Vitamin D.

“Numerous studies link vitamin D and influenza, as well as vitamin D and respiratory infections more generally.”

In fact Vitamin D isn’t a vitamin but a pre-hormone and it isn’t as easy as as you may imagine to get our fair share. It takes about 48 hours to penetrate the skin and is fat soluble. This means that when we use detergents to wash our skin, or soap for that matter; you’ll be washing a good deal of it down the plughole. Before we all take the best course of action and vow never to wash again; Philip Day offers some practical advice on this:

“Use soap and water on your underarms and naughty bits and water on the rest.”

Many suntan lotions filter out UVB and yet allow UVA, the solar radiation that many scientists believe is the one responsible for the melanoma epidemic.

This is just about being sensible. About allowing your children time in the sun, sunscreen free for a bit each day.

It may also be about supplementation, especially through the winter and especially if you are unwell. My mind drifts to those old people’s homes with row upon row of grannies and grandads sat in chairs often all day; or for those in hospital for weeks at a time; not getting the chance for the sun to warm their faces and certainly not for enough time to harness the beams of what maybe the greatest healer of all.

Phillip Day suggests getting tested. To see what baseline you are starting from. What is required is technically known as a 25-hydroxy D test for calcidiol levels in the blood. If they are feeling magnanimous you may get this from your doctor. But know this; if you are feeling unwell ; you are almost certainly going to find yourself Vitamin D deficient.

Average intake for this life giving substance is 200-400 IU per day.

What is required is 4,000 IU per day.

Your body can store vitamin D, but with these kind of figures it looks as though most of us are falling woefully short. Muslim women and those with darker skin living in colder regions may have even more of a problem. I recently suggested that a Muslim friend of mine get her levels checked by her doctor. She was dangerously low.

So get outside, get checked, get dosed up and don’t wash it all off again.

I am sorry that I have not been in touch for a while. But I have been busy and have loads to report back with, which I will feed back over the next few days.

I have just come back uplifted and charged with the energy and enthusiasm of Phillip Day, who is currently on tour and who came to Worthing yesterday.

My first subject is a very touchy one. With millions running the marathon yesterday, many of them raising money for charity, I felt personally that this was Big Pharma companies preying on the scared minds of our vulnerable people and making money out of it. I certainly don’t want to down play the tremendous personal effort made by each and every one of those runners who trained for months to reach their dreams. They are amazing people each and every one of them. I just wish that the sponsorship hadn’t become a misguided money making enterprise.

Phillip Day was in total agreement:

Britain leads the industrial world in its failure to halt the disease. The General medical council likes to attack doctors using safe, alternative means to cure the problem. More people will die of cancer next year than in previous years – more people will contract it too. The UK, or what’s left of it has the worst cancer survival rates of any western industrialised nation…Into this woeful mix you can toss all those upbeat charity reports: ‘The war on cancer is being won, just give us another 170 million’ when the war on cancer is being deliberately lost. Oh and those 80% of women surviving breast cancer? They really aren’t In desperation to maintain credibility and show progress for the big buck spent, Big Cancer has redefined the word ‘survive’ to mean only five years after initial treatment.

Health Review Credence, Phillip Day

Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumours.

Dr Allen Levin

If I contracted cancer I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centres have a chance.

Charles Mathe, French Cancer Specialist

I have also written about the alternative work of Sr Simoncini, an oncologist in Italy (who has now been struck off for taking his excited views on to the world stage) – working with just baking soda and maple syrup he had a list of cured terminally ill patients…some of them doctors themselves.

So what can be done about cancer?

The truth is of course very simple. Dietary Changes.

That means no meat, yes no meat. But lets face it most people would rather endure chemotherapy and its ravages than trust that nature knows best. Such is the power of Big brother’s persuasion.

No meat, no table salt. No Dairy. No additives. Just organic, fresh vegetables, plenty of them raw.

Phillip points out that the World Cancer Research Fund will send you a 650 page book on what is probably very obvious but so often ignored:

If you’re fat you’re more likely to get cancer. If you smoke you’re more likely to get cancer. If you take drugs and medications, you’re more likely to get cancer. If you’re stressed, depressed, grieving, bankrupt, jilted, divorced or just plain lazy, you’re more likely to get cancer. If you lack vitamins B, A, C E and D, you’re more likely to get cancer.

Phillip Day

Phillip also made the point that despite the complete manipulation of the truth by our media, those vitamins cited above are not going to cause any problems even given in mega doses.

We watched a film of a farmer, whose family refused to let doctors turn of his life support system after he contracted swine flu. Instead they insisted on mega doses of vitamin C. It saved his life. He did pull through, despite the doctors repeated attempts to take him off the vit C.

Sorry not to have posted for a few days. The heating is still off and I am not going to keep writing about how chilly it is. Instead I am going to spend the time enjoying this Easter break with my family. Will catch up again very soon.

The time has come to say a great BIG thank you for putting my life back
on track .
I have to say that when we first met back in early June this year I felt that
I would not make the year out.
Your timely intervention thanks to daughter in law fixing for me to see you
Has changed my life.
On my first visit to you conducted a patient histot and made the suggestion
that I request of my GP blood tests which they had NOT carried out ,these
three tests
These three tests turned out be well well below the correct levels PANIC
by GP 24 hours had phone call saying MUST put you on VIT’S to cover
problem .
My second visit to you I had with me a copy of all blood tests to date and
at this stage you made recommendations for additional supplements to help.
My GP at this stage took me off (STATINS & Metformin both of which
were a great part n my problems.
I was told by GP that it would take 5 to 6^ months to recover from these
.medications but have to say that “THANK YOU” 4 months and am ready to
Take on the world.

GEMMA LOVE you are the best and I thank you from the bottom of my
heart.

Regards and best wishes .
Mike Hird

.PS Sorry for delay in this but find it easy to say what is in my heart by
voice but had to wait until hand and heart got it together